Want to add some quick color to your performance or film? Slip in a quick non-narrative vendor scene. No need for character or plot development. The audience will be quite content with the hawkers’ musical recitation of their wares.

As he began work on the production, Tsekhanovsky invited Dimitry Shostakovich to compose the score, an innovation at a time when musical accompaniment was added to completed silent films. Shostakovich started, but was derailed by Pravda’s 1936 denunciation of his work in an article titled "Muddle Instead of Music."

Eventually Tsekhanovskiy threw in the towel, too.

It does not end there, however.

After Shostakovich’s death, his widow got his student, Vadim Biberga, to complete work on the unfinished score. The Russian Philharmonic Orchestra released it in 2006, as part of a Shostakovich centennial.

This recent history adds an air of defiance to the grotesqueries of the surviving clip, with top honors going to the smut peddler entering at the one minute mark, to extol the virtues of “a Venus with no garments and fat thighs.”

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.